What can make amends for the loss of the camp-fire, with innumerable pictures glowing and shifting in its heart, and conjuring strange shapes out of the surrounding gloom, and suggesting unseen mysteries that the circle of darkness holds behind its rim? How are the wells of conversation to be thawed out by a black stove, so that tales of hunters' and fishers' craft and adventure shall flow till the measure of man's belief is overrun? How is the congenial spark of true companionship to be kindled when people brood around a stove and light their pipes with matches, and not with coals snatched out of the camp-fire's edge, or with twigs that burn briefly with baffling flame? But it will not be long before it will be impossible to get a taste of real camping without taking long and expensive journeys, for every available rod of lake shore and river bank is being taken up and made populous with so-called camps, and the comfortable freedom and seclusion of a real camp are made impossible there. One desiring that might better pitch his tent in the back woodlot of a farm than in any such popular resort. This misnamed camping out has become a fashion which seems likely to last till the shores are as thronged as the towns, and the woods are spoiled for the real campers, whom it is possible to imagine seeking in the summers of the future a seclusion in the cities that the forests and streams no longer can give them. Yet, let it be understood that make-believe camping is better than no camping. It cannot but bring people into more intimate relations with nature than they would be if they stayed at home, and so to better acquaintance with our common mother, who deals so impartially with all her children. XXIII THE CAMP-FIRE If "the open fire furnishes the room," the camp-fire does more for the camp. It is its life--a life that throbs out in every flare and flicker to enliven the surroundings, whether they be the trees of the forest, the expanse of prairie, shadowed only by clouds and night, or the barren stretch of sandy shore. Out of the encompassing gloom of all these, the camp-fire materializes figures as real to the eye as flesh and blood. It peoples the verge of darkness with grotesque forms, that leap and crouch and sway with the rise and fall and bending of the flame to the wind, and that beckon the fancy out to grope in the mystery of night. Then imagination soars with the updrift of smoke and the climbing galaxy of fading sparks, to where the steadfast stars shine out of the unvisited realm that only imagination can explore.